The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [37]
“But you don’t have to act it out so flamboyantly,” Jodocus came back, ineptly using cruelty to conceal and assuage his own misery. “We’ve evolved beyond sapiens now, let alone erectus. We’ve gotten past the tyranny of primitive emotion. We’ve matured.” Jodocus was the oldest of us, and he had lately begun to seem much older than ten years my senior, although he was still some way short of his first century. Had he been a falsie he’d have been booking a date for his first rejuve, and the rhythms of social tradition seemed to be producing some kind of weird existential echo in his being.
“It’s what I feel,” I told him, retreating into uncompromising assertion. “I can’t help it. Grizel’s dead, and I couldn’t save her. She might have told a few lies in her time, but she didn’t deserve to die. I’m entitled to cry.”
“We all loved her,” Eve reminded me. “We’ll all miss her. Nobody deserves to die, but sometimes it happens, even to people like us. You’re not proving anything, Morty.”
What she meant was that I wasn’t proving anything except my own instability, but she spoke more accurately than she thought. I wasn’t proving anything at all. I was just reacting—atavistically, perhaps, but with crude honesty and authentically childlike innocence. But I had laid the theoretical groundwork for that reaction in the still-unpublished Prehistory of Death. I had argued that my reaction was the kind of reaction that had propelled the Old Human Race out of apehood and into wisdom, and I was damned if I was going to be told by a bunch of amateurs who were still in denial that I ought to put on a braver face.
“We have to pull together now,” Camilla put in, “for Grizel’s sake.”
If only it had been that easy. In fact, we all flew apart with remarkable rapidity. Our little knot in the fabric of neohuman society dissolved into the warp and weft, almost as if it had never been—or so it seemed at the time. Much later, I came to realize that it had made a much deeper and more indelible mark on me than I knew; I suspect that it was the same for the others in spite of all their stiff-jawed self-control.
It’s not obvious why a death in the family almost always leads to divorce in childless marriages, but that’s the way it works. Camilla wasn’t being foolish—such a loss does force the survivors to pull together—but the process of pulling together usually serves only to emphasize the fragility and incompleteness of the unit.
We all went our separate ways before the century ended, even the three Rainmakers. From then on, they worked on the management of separate storms.
TWENTY-ONE
The first edition of the introductory section of my History of Death, entitled The Prehistory of Death, was launched into the Labyrinth in 21 January 2614.
As with any modern work of scholarship, the greater part of The Prehistory of Death was designed as an aleph: a tiny point whose radiants shone in every direction and spread into the vast multidimensional edifice of the web to connect up billions of data into a new and hopefully interesting pattern. Many contemporary works did no more than that, and there was a zealous school of thought which insisted that a true historian ought not to attempt any more than that. A scientific historian, these zealots claimed, ought not to dabble in commentary at all; his task was merely to organize the data in such a way that they could best speak for themselves. In this view, any historian who supplied a commentary was superimposing on the data a narrative of his own, which was at best superfluous and at worst distortive.
My response to that argument was identical to Julius Ngomi’s: all history is fantasy.
I do not mean by this that history is devoid